In the Offing, Another Hall In Carnegie's Basement

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

Published: January 3, 1998

A venerable but largely forgotten piece of New York stage history -- where concert pianists played the works of a Viennese contemporary named Brahms and David Belasco, Agnes Moorehead and Spencer Tracy once trod the boards -- is being auditioned for a comeback at Carnegie Hall.

The historic performance space is an ornate underground recital hall that opened in 1891 when Andrew Carnegie's workmen were still hammering the final nails into the main music hall above on the uptown prairie of 57th Street and Seventh Avenue.

Having recently reclaimed part of its Seventh Avenue facade long occupied by a movie theater and two stores whose leases were allowed to expire, Carnegie Hall wants to recreate the space as a third house to augment its main concert hall of 2,804 seats and the 268-seat Weill Recital Hall.

For the moment the institution's leaders are saying little of their plans because, they say, they don't have any. ''We're still in the dreaming stage,'' said Judith Arron, Carnegie Hall's executive director, who was even squeamish about allowing photographs of the ungroomed space, vacated several months ago by its last tenant, Cineplex Odeon.

But she said, ''It's a wonderful space that offers wonderful opportunities for Carnegie Hall to have another working space.'' Ideally, she said, it would offer opportunities for programs different from the concerts and recitals now presented at the other two halls -- perhaps, she said, something in line with Carnegie Hall's growing commitment to educational programming for young people. It might lend its stage to drama and dance, Ms. Arron said, ''but music is our heart and soul.''

The size of the new hall also remains to be determined, although she said, it could in no way have the original 1,200-seat capacity. ''People are larger today,'' she said, and there are fire laws. It is also far too soon, she said, to speak of costs, although the renovation money would have to be raised in a campaign. It should all be decided, she said, within the next three to four months. Then, she said, ''we can move forward with a design.''

Ms. Arron said the reconstruction might also allow for creation of long-needed wing space at stage left in the main concert hall.

Whatever the project's ultimate scope, however, it is unlikely to match the major 1980's interior and exterior renovation, which cost $60 million (and gratuitously added a deadening layer of concrete under the main stage that was not discovered and ripped up until 1995). The rich history of Carnegie Hall and its performance and studio spaces emerges from shelves of old programs, artifacts, architectural drawings and other records maintained by its museum director and archivist, Gino Francesconi.

A former Carnegie Hall usher, history buff and student of piano and conducting, Mr. Francesconi convinced Ms. Arron shortly after she took over as executive director in 1986 that the institution deserved a resident historian. He advertises in antiques newsletters for missing programs and other items and mounts free exhibits of memorabilia in Carnegie Hall's Rose Museum, open during concert hours to ticket holders and to the public from 11 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. every day but Wednesday.

Some of the finds were fortuitous. Several years ago, Mr. Francesconi said, a patron accidentally dropped a musical score borrowed from the library into a crevice between the balcony and the dress circle. Workers trying to retrieve it found a hollow area into which cleaning people over many years had swept debris. The heap yielded antique medicine bottles, some in the shape of tubas, and nearly a century's worth of ticket stubs. They quickly made their way into the archives.

Treasures and curiosities now on display in the museum include a 1954 handwritten letter from Marlon Brando, then living in one of Carnegie Hall's 130 residential and rehearsal studios, thanking a neighbor, the singer Jeanne Beauvais, for her courage and perseverence in ''hall-battling,'' saving him from fans who stalked him in the corridors.

There is also a booking ledger and program for Feb. 12, 1964, listing ''The Beetles,'' and ''John McCartney,'' apparently not yet well known enough for their names to be spelled properly; one of Caruso's first phonograph records; Benny Goodman's clarinet; Toscanini's baton, and a section of floorboards showing the nailheads and tape marks where Horowitz liked his piano to be placed precisely.

Other records in the archives trace the construction of the Italianate palazzo hall beginning in 1889. Mr. Francesconi has the silver-plated trowel, on loan from a museum in Carnegie's native Scotland, that Mrs. Carnegie used to lay the cornerstone the next year. It was first known as the Music Hall, founded by Andrew Carnegie, then Carnegie's Music Hall and finally Carnegie Hall.

Carnegie, the steel baron, assembled the site from eight parcels, spending $200,000 for the land and $725,000 for the construction, Mr. Francesconi said. The corner of Seventh Avenue and 56th Street was owned by the Henry Elias Brewery, and Elias initially refused to sell, convinced that the excellence of his beer was due to his spring water source. Eventually, however, Mr. Francesconi said, Elias found what he regarded as a superior spring at Lexington Avenue and 86th Street and agreed to move.

The underground recital hall was completed first, or so it is clear from a program of April 1, 1891, in which the presenter of the pianist, Arthur Friedheim, a pupil of Liszt, ''respectfully requests the indulgence of the audience for the inconvenience caused by the noises incident to the completion of the main hall of the building, it being a matter entirely beyond its control.'' The program included works by Brahms, who, the program advised, ''lives in Vienna.''

Built to accommodate as many as 1,200 patrons, the columned hall with beamed ceiling had a balcony and two slightly raised side galleries. The seats were removable so the space could be converted into a ballroom and banquet hall, and it had attached kitchen and pantries.

By May 1891 the main hall was finished and ceremonially inaugurated with a week of concerts featuring Tchaikovsky, ''the eminent Russian composer, who will conduct several of his own works.''

In 1896 a young acting school called the American Academy of Dramatic Arts moved into the downstairs recital hall, holding classes and staging performances there for the next 58 years. David Belasco and Charles Frohman were among the instructors, and students over the years included Hume Cronyn, Edward G. Robinson, Anne Bancroft, Garson Kanin, Betty Field, Rosalind Russell and Jennifer Jones as well as Tracy and Moorehead.

The Academy moved out in 1954 and other theater groups rented the recital hall until 1960, when it became a cinema, the Carnegie Playhouse. To turn the hall into a movie house, a screen was dropped in front of the stage, the side galleries were walled up and the balcony was sealed off for a projection room.

This week, Mr. Francesconi flipped through old movie posters left behind on the derelict refreshment counter. On the wall behind him a panel proclaimed: ''Coming Soon.'' The space below was blank.

Photos: Old ticket stubs from the archives in Carnegie Hall's museum. (Librado Romero/The New York Times)(pg. B7); The Seventh Avenue entrance to what Carnegie Hall hopes will be a recreation room of a different sort in its basement. (Librado Romero/The New York Times)(pg. B8)